Hollywood is hardly a big fan of Donald Trump, but on the upcoming reboot of “Roseanne,” the title character will be a supporter of the Republican president.
The award-winning ABC sitcom is returning for a 10th season in March, after a gap of 21 years, and actress Roseanne Barr says depicting her working-class character as pro-Trump was a necessity.
“I’ve always tried have it be a true reflection of the society we live in. I feel like half the people voted for Trump and half didn’t, so it’s just realistic,” Barr said Monday.
The 65-year-old told journalists at the Television Critics Association winter press tour in Pasadena, southern California, that hating people for the way they voted in 2016 was “not American.”
“And, in fact, it was working-class people who elected Trump, so I felt like that was very real and something that needed to be discussed,” she added.
Barr has been a vocal Trump supporter on Twitter, telling her 430,000 followers she voted for him to “shake up” the status quo and because he is “draining the swamp” and going after child sex traffickers.
The atmosphere in Pasadena’s Langham Huntington hotel was testy at times, with one journalist asking how a character who had shown herself to be anti-racist could realistically be written now as supporting a bigot.
“That’s your opinion,” Barr responded curtly, before conceding that the president talked “a lot of crazy shit” and insisting she was not a “Trump apologist.”
“There are a lot of things he has said and done that I don’t agree with, like there’s probably a lot of things that Hillary Clinton has done and said that you don’t agree with,” she said.
